David Sinclair, a professor at Harvard Medical School, has said that he thinks the first person who will live to the age of 150 is already alive today. During a panel discussion about longevity at the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum in New York City on Sept. 10, TIME executive editor Nikhil Kumar asked Sinclair what motivated him to say that.
“Children born today will live into the 22nd century, and just think about in the last five years what’s happened to our world; it’s barely recognizable when it comes to AI and even the healthcare world,” Sinclair replied. “So, in the 22nd century, children born today are going to have access to technologies that we literally cannot even imagine now.”
Sinclair was joined on stage by Jennifer Garrison, a neuroscientist with expertise in the women’s health biotech field, and Jack Jia, the founder and CEO of Musely, a telehealth platform aimed at expanding access to personalized prescription care that sponsored the event on Sept. 10.
Garrison’s longevity work focuses largely on women’s health, in particular on ovaries—something she said affects not just women, but everyone, because “understanding the differences between male bodies and female bodies gives us levers with which to develop medicines.”
“When we miss female physiology, we’ve essentially left out half of the picture,” she said.
For example, she said, female bodies tend to be better at fighting viruses than male bodies. Researchers don’t fully understand why, but if they were able to understand those differences, it could help better equip the medical community to treat everyone depending on their needs, Garrison argued.
When Kumar asked her how far along the medical field is in understanding these differences, Garrison replied, “We’re pretty far behind, as it turns out.” But, she continued, “Everyone understands that there’s a challenge here that we’ve got a data gap, that we’ve got this systemic bias about our research, that we’re essentially, I think, generations behind.”
“It’s not years. It’s not decades. It’s generations behind in terms of the data,” she said. “So we’re catching up, but it’s going to take a while.”
During the conversation, Jia shared that he was inspired to expand Musely beyond being a skincare tip platform after his wife’s struggle to find effective treatments for her melasma.
“This kind of wellness or cosmetics conditions are everyone’s problem,” Jia said. But “the entire healthcare system is not designed to solve that problem; it’s designed to solve that real sick person who is dying.”
Since then, Jia has broadened Musely’s scope to include re
Kumar went on to ask the panelists what they think about the recent “explosion in testing” in the longevity space—how people are getting all kinds of tests and scans to, they claim, optimize living longer and better. Garrison said that, where there is evidence for the test, it’s a great option. But that is not always the case.
“I think we can all acknowledge that there’s a little bit of a credibility issue in the longevity space, and a lot of the products that are marketed are either poorly supported by evidence or outright pseudoscience,” Garrison said. “For women, the amount of information and marketing that comes at us these days is crazy. And part of the problem is that it’s very hard as a consumer, as someone who’s not a scientist or a doctor, to really make the call between, ‘Is this real or not?’”
Sinclair expressed concerns that what people used to consider to be “fringe” behaviors, such as injecting oneself with peptides or taking drugs that have not yet been proven to be effective in humans, is becoming more common.
“I wonder where we’re going to go,” he said. “But I do applaud the fact that people do have the right, with their doctors … to try something if there’s nothing else that works, and there’s no seemingly bad downside.”
“I thought that five years ago, in my opinion, the regulations were so strict that even people who were suffering or dying couldn’t get medicines,” he continued. “That was too extreme in my view, but we’ve gone with the other extreme.”
The TIME100 Health Leadership Forum was presented by the American Cancer Society, Kite—a Gilead Sciences company, Insulet, Musely, and NMDP.
